I mean, we are in the middle of a PTR that will do a lot to vary gameplay. They said already that when they are done with 2.4 they will focus more on content.
It has been, I think, a bit over four months since launch? I think we are going in the right direction.
I would like to see some of the top builds balanced down, and others balanced up, so the game is overall a bit harder. If they don’t want to nerf, they should continue to buff more builds up to the point where they can do P3-P4 content pretty well on their own. Regardles of which path they choose there, they should add in Mapping or some other similar system that raises the difficulty ceiling of the game.
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Have you been living under a rock? Ladder is in testing now on PTR. There’s been multiple news updates about it. It’s coming. The game is not dying, not even close.
New builds will become viable and such as well. It’s a good update as long as you’re not a total purist.
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They said before launch that ladder wouldn’t be available until the game was stable. You could have refunded at that point and bought it when ladder dropped. No problem. You didn’t, so deal with it.
The first part of PTR featured changes to core aspects of the environment to improve stability. When 2.4 launches, the game will be stable and the ladder can drop.
If they dropped ladder already, it would have been a mess of login queues and instability that would have made it a disaster for Blizzard and for players’ gaming experience. It is good they are working on stability first instead of rushing in.
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There’s no “mental gymnastics” going on here. (But being intelligent is not “doing mental gymnastics.”)
First, if you want to get all technical and legal about it, Presale advertising said the game would have ladder. It did not say it would have it at launch. They did not break any promises here. It is no one’s fault but yours for not reading correctly. Yes, it has taken longer than any of us would have liked, but it’s better that it’s delayed and gotten right instead of released like Cyberpunk 2047.
Remember that game? Released when it wasn’t ready? And here we have people whining and demanding them to release something before it’s ready. Which would inevitably invite more of the same kind of complaining./
Man, it really sucks to be a developer these days. Whether you do it right or not, someone’s going to complain, so you really can’t win.
As others have said, you had the oppertunity to cancel your preorder or not play the game after finding out that ladder wasn’t going to be available immediately. The fact that you didn’t is no one’s fault but yours.
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I don’t care about other games. They said shortly after ladder. This isn’t shortly after ladder. I’d challenge anyone to say they honestly believe this is shortly after ladder in the context the tweets were given. I’d also say they lied when they said ladder would come with the patch that fixes the issues.
Everyone wants to say I could have refunded like they are original. If they said “ladder will
Be out months after servers are fixed and we are able to make significant balance changes and no ladder with 1.14 will ever exist” then you’d have an argument because that’s what happened and no where near what they portrayed. Just because they have a TOS that allows them to mislead doesn’t mean it is right or that they were honest. They were not.
You can argue intent but they did not live up to the pre release expectations regarding ladder and EVERYONE knows that. The fact so many can’t acknowledge that is shameful. This is company making millions off of us and I personally Believe misled to make more $ because If they were transparent there would have been a lot of returns
Blizzard didn’t do anything right regarding ladder. They didn’t do the noble thing. They chose sept 23. When it become apparent the ladder was a loooong way away they fought refunds. And while it is Legal they kept the money it’s grossly unethical and to me theft. No one and I mean no one thought ladder wouldn’t be out until 6 months plus post launch. I’m so sick of people asking like I should’ve known what no one knew. If It came out in 4 months post launch which to me is still long after “shortly after” I would have been able to play. I didn’t need it immediately
To be worth the $40. I’m demanding I get what was sold to me not “getting something before it’s ready”. If ladder truly wasn’t ready until now then they never were even remotely close in sept. It wasn’t server issues. It was a convenient excuse so they could meet the sept 23 deadline for launch and delay ladder until they got to it. The alternatives aren’t ladder before April and a mess or April. They could have spent the time and resources and had it a long time ago. They CHOSE not to.
For the people that still don’t get it. I loan someone money and they say I’ve got you sept 23. Then a month before they are like hey man I changed jobs but I’ll get it to you shortly after. He already has my money and shortly after works for me. Well 5 months plus go by. Where is my money? Should I have known better than to trust a liar? Maybe. Does that mean I lose the right to be mad at the liar and thief? Hardly
MissCheetah
1693 posts
MVP
Oct '21
They want to start Ladder as soon as possible though. I am sure the AVX patch is one of the larger hold ups right now. I also see some crashing reports related to the newer patches and maybe some chars still vanishing? Not sure on that. I can’t look at accounts obviously. Some are accidental deletes, some are crashing on a char during gameplay and some data is lost, others are linking a Console to the wrong Bnet account. Stuff like that.
Still a few things to work out before we get a time. I do know they don’t want to wait months.
That quote is from cheetah in October. So they didn’t think this would happen either. But i should’ve known right?
You should not have known when ladder would start which is exactly the reason to get a refund of your pre-order. All my smart friends that wanted D2R only for ladder either refunded or have not ordered.
It is a digital purchase. There is no penalty for waiting. In fact, there was an incentive to wait if ladder was significantly delayed since the game might (and did) go on sale.
Lastly, my friends all knew that ladder in D2R could turn into another W3R situation. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
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I didn’t ask you to care about other games. It was an example for the sake of a point.
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They probably did intend to have it “shortly after” (even though this is still a very vague statement and what constitutes shortly after is likely to be different from one person to another), but then we had the server database issues, and they had to drop everything they were doing to fix that. They did also explicitly state that ladder would happen after confirming game stability. It turns out there were in fact stability issues.
“Everyone wants to say I could have refunded like they are original.”
They say that because it’s true. This information was avialable before release. You had the opportunity to make a choice.
Look, the whole tone and wording of your complaint characterizes this as some sort of malice on Vicarious Visions’ (the developers) or Activision’s (the publisher) part. THe problem is this simply isn’t true. Crap can take longer than we plan. They posted many updates about the server issues and ladder and such. It’s not like they were being dishonest. They have no obligation to give a refund to every disgruntled person who played the game for some period of time despite having this complaint. You clearly got some value out of the game up to this point or you wouldn’t have waited this long.
I’m not trying to jump through hoops to defend blizzard here. Your demands are unreasonable and you should, knowing how the industry works today, know that not everything will always go according to plan. That doesn’t mean someone’s trying to screw you over or hates you or whatever. You should stop buying videogames altogether if you expect every developer and publisher to live up to exact dates and times for everything.
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I tonight it was a near 0% chance in September that I wouldn’t have ladder before March which is all I need to be able to play. I have an older laptop so playing and optimizing was nice and I added ram in prep for ladder. Did one run through to Ubers as a warm up so why would I return when I could
Get a warm up. Test my computer and had literally zero concern? I am very hesitant to believe more than a very small handful asked for refunds due to ladder pre release
I asked for a refund back in October and was denied so I didn’t “wait this long”.
You literally said they probably planned it sooner (like they said) but it didn’t happen but I was supposed to know they wouldn’t deliver? It can’t be both. If by your own words they didn’t live up to the expectations THEY portrayed then in my opinion refunds are due. They can give me a refund and remove every game from my account for all I care.
You and many others either intentionally or subconsciously use language that changes the meaning just enough. They didn’t say after sever issues they would work on releasing ladder. They said once it was stable (not after) and also said it would likely be in the same patch/fix which clearly didn’t happen. I get you don’t think they are wrong but at least be accurate
If expecting what I paid for makes me unreasonable then so be it. In any other industry this would never fly and would have serious push backs but since the price is low and the cost to fight is high and ToS make fighting it both extra costly and a high chance of losing players are screwed. I’ll take your advice and not buy future Diablo’s as sad as that is because I don’t want them to have a penny
How were you supposed to know? Again, how were THEY supposed to know? Nobody has a crystal ball to predict the future. What matters is they were honest and upfront when things didn’t go as planned. They have been giving us regular updates as they have had more information to offer.
You also didn’t previously specify that you did try to get a refund prior. That would have made a difference in my responses.
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A ton of people asked for and received refunds of their pre-order for removal of TCP/IP, no ladder at launch, too many changes, … Blizzard was upfront.
So much this.
Slp,
You do not need ladder to play D2R and everyone had a fresh start at launch.
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Agan as previously established in this thread, ladder was not promised to be at launch, ever.
The removal of TCP IP can be blamed on the people who hacked the beta test and went to enable people to play without being accepted into the test. The devs had previously said it was planned, by the way, it was the publisher’s decision to have it removed because of what happened in the beta test.
“Too many changes” is subjective, and they described the changes that were happening long, long, long, long before release. If you didn’t like the changes they were making, you had plenty of opportunity to simply not buy it.
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No kidding! I don’t need ladder to play d2r. Who knew? You are as bad as micro. I bought it for ladder. Period. By far the number one reason and nothing else is close. Only played ladder once it started in d2 and d3. Literally never non ladder. But I don’t need to justify my purchasing reasons to you. The simple fact is my reason for buying wasn’t met. Said it 100 times. Could have been an issue with Druid being broken and not playable. There would be people saying just play another class blah blah.
You’re part of a very, very, short list of people IMO. I don’t need a ladder to start and end to do a “fresh start.” I can do that whenever I want. Why is this so important? It’s a cool feature. It’s not essential in any way.
The simple fact is my reason for buying wasn’t met.
You had all the time in the world to not buy it, but you did anyway (Well, I’m assuming you did, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be here complaining)
Ultimately, the ladder is coming, within a few weeks probably, since we’re playing it now on the PTR.
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Literally my only concern was ladder. Other changes didn’t bother me. If ladder wasn’t planned at launch then it was bogus how they advertised for pre sale and you know it. If it didn’t have ladder advertised I don’t buy pre sale. Then after buying I was misled. Period. Whether intentionally or by issues or whatever.
I cannot play ladder due to real life starting in March so I didn’t get what I paid for. I tried three times for refunds In oct and nov.
I don’t just like the fresh start for me I liken the fun of the fresh economy. Trading is the most fun part to me. And launch didn’t have that feel. So much up in the air and didn’t make sense to grind to the max for a ladder coming shortly after. So I didn’t. Jokes on me. But to think I don’t have a right to gripe. Completely disagree. I get that I’m annoying and aggressive and beating a dead horse but if you can’t truly understand why I feel misled and robbed then you aren’t being honest with yourself.
Tangent:
I know some people view the ladder as an opportunity to “fresh start” (as noted though, a ladder really isn’t necessary to do this), and some people also do like the competitive element (which is the real reason it’s called a ladder). But to be honest, it is this latter point that really perplexes me about ladder. It’s just a contest of who has the least amount of a life- While there is an efficiency factor, really, whoever dumps the most hours in with the fewest breaks while following widely available EXP guides on the internet, will win.
I’d like the ladder concept a LITTLE better if XP didn’t simply stop when you reached max level. As it stands, when you reach lv99, it simply becomes a hundreds to thousands way tie for first place. Once someone reaches max level first, there isn’t really much reason to continue playing for this purpose until the next season starts. Or, ranking could be based on some other metric that doesn’t have a finite end point.
But on the whole, I think the whole concept of a ranking system in a single player / co-op ARPG is just silly in the first place.
Really?
I mean, come on. Blizzard doesn’t know when you work, Blizzard doesn’t know what your life schedule is like. I’m not going to pretend that I understand what your life is like, but … ??? Your “real life” starts in march? Didn’t it start when you were born? If you mean you work seasonally, so what? the ladder will be waiting for you in the fall or winter or whenever it is your “real life” ends.
You played the game. As far as any business that sells things is concerned, if they aren’t offering a satisfaction guarantee, once you pass the point of the return policy, you’re SOL. This isn’t their fault, it’s yours.
I can certainly respect this perspective on it. But really. They established BEFORE RELEASE that it wasn’t going to be immediately at launch. If this was the only thing that mattered to you, why didn’t you simply wait to buy it until the feature was implemented? Even if it was only going to be a short time. If it was such a dealbreaker, you should have held on to your money until you knew you would be able to enjoy it from the moment of purchase.
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I agree with this for the most part. Main reason ladder appealed to me more this time was I had the time to no life it and would probably be the last no life gaming run id ever do. Now there just won’t be one. I am not for adding rifts to d2 but as far as ranking the d3 at least makes more sense that it’s a time factor and at least “some” skill
Once it comes, it’s not going anywhere. There must be some point in the future where you’ll be able to put time into playing it.
I mean, I hope you’re playing it right now, to be honest. I’m having more fun than I would have honestly expected playing a four-day season, seeing how far I can get before it stops lol- not to compete with anyone, only to compete with myself.
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